“You have,” I said shortly.
I got into bed, shivering slightly, and tucked my gown down round my legs. Frank scooted automatically in my direction, and I slid down under the sheets beside him, huddling together to pool our warmth against the cold.
“Oh, wait; I’ve got to move the phone.” I flung back the covers and scrambled out again, to move the phone from Frank’s side of the bed to mine. He liked to sit in bed in the early evening, chatting with students and colleagues while I read or made surgical notes beside him, but he resented being wakened by the late calls that came from the hospital for me. Resented it enough that I had arranged for the hospital to call only for absolute emergencies, or when I left instructions to keep me informed of a specific patient’s progress. Tonight I had left instructions; it was a tricky bowel resection. If things went wrong, I might have to go back in in a hurry.
Frank grunted as I turned out the light and slipped into bed again, but after a moment, he rolled toward me, throwing an arm across my middle. I rolled onto my side and curled against him, gradually relaxing as my chilled toes thawed.
I mentally replayed the details of the operation, feeling again the chill at my feet from the refrigeration in the operating room and the initial, unsettling feeling of the warmth in the patient’s belly as my gloved fingers slid inside. The diseased bowel itself, coiled like a viper, patterned with the purple splotches of ecchymosis and the slow leakage of bright blood from tiny ruptures.
“I’d been thinking.” Frank’s voice came out of the darkness behind me, excessively casual.
“Mm?” I was still absorbed in the vision of the surgery, but struggled to pull myself back to the present. “About what?”
“My sabbatical.” His leave from the university was due to start in a month. He had planned to make a series of short trips through the northeastern United States, gathering material, then go to England for six months, returning to Boston to spend the last three months of the sabbatical writing.
“I’d thought of going to England straight off,” he said carefully.
“Well, why not? The weather will be dreadful, but if you’re going to spend most of the time in libraries…”
“I want to take Brianna with me.”
I stopped dead, the cold in the room suddenly coalescing into a small lump of suspicion in the pit of my stomach.
“She can’t go now; she’s only a semester from graduation. Surely you can wait until we can join you in the summer? I’ve put in for a long vacation then, and perhaps…”
“I’m going now. For good. Without you.”
I pulled away and sat up, turning on the light. Frank lay blinking up at me, dark hair disheveled. It had gone gray at the temples, giving him a distinguished air that seemed to have alarming effects on the more susceptible of his female students. I felt quite astonishingly composed.
“Why now, all of a sudden? The latest one putting pressure on you, is she?”
The look of alarm that flashed into his eyes was so pronounced as to be comical. I laughed, with a noticeable lack of humor.
“You actually thought I didn’t know? God, Frank! You are the most…oblivious man!”
He sat up in bed, jaw tight.
“I thought I had been most discreet.”
“You may have been at that,” I said sardonically. “I counted six over the last ten years—if there were really a dozen or so, then you were quite the model of discretion.”
His face seldom showed great emotion, but a whitening beside his mouth told me that he was very angry indeed.
“This one must be something special,” I said, folding my arms and leaning back against the headboard in assumed casualness. “But still—why the rush to go to England now, and why take Bree?”
“She can go to boarding school for her last term,” he said shortly. “Be a new experience for her.”
“Not one I expect she wants,” I said. “She won’t want to leave her friends, especially not just before graduation. And certainly not to go to an English boarding school!” I shuddered at the thought. I had come within inches of being immured in just such a school as a child; the scent of the hospital cafeteria sometimes evoked memories of it, complete with the waves of terrified helplessness I had felt when Uncle Lamb had taken me to visit the place.
“A little discipline never hurt anyone,” Frank said. He had recovered his temper, but the lines of his face were still tight. “Might have done you some good.” He waved a hand, dismissing the topic. “Let that be. Still, I’ve decided to go back to England permanently. I’ve a good position offered at Cambridge, and I mean to take it up. You won’t leave the hospital, of course. But I don’t mean to leave my daughter behind.”
“Your daughter?” I felt momentarily incapable of speech. So he had a new job all set, and a new mistress to go along. He’d been planning this for some time, then. A whole new life—but not with Brianna.
“My daughter,” he said calmly. “You can come to visit whenever you like, of course…”
“You…bloody…bastard!” I said.
“Do be reasonable, Claire.” He looked down his nose, giving me Treatment A, long-suffering patience, reserved for students appealing failing grades. “You’re scarcely ever home. If I’m gone, there will be no
